John Gruber, a tech blogger who closely follows Apple, said his sources had confirmed that Apple had until midway through 2013 to run on its licence deal with Google.

He added that it had decided to act now in order to add turn-by-turn directions to its offering without having to concede extra branding rights or permission for further data collection to the search giant.

This is interesting. I wonder if it's why Google aren't ready with a native iOS app?